A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(19)

It was an uneventful journey. Most things—and boy, did this forest have more than its fair share of Things—didn’t bother us, either because of the knives or because they were looking for even bigger, juicier Things to eat. Around lunch (half a carrot cake Clif Bar apiece, which Eva considered with scientific curiosity, palpating it gently before realizing she was expected to consume it), something horrible landed on my open pack. It tore at the contents, shredding and shrieking, long talons flashing.

Eva had it pinned to a tree with her knife through its heart before I could properly scream. I would tell you what kind of animal it was, but I have no idea, and looking at it made my brain cramp. So I’ll just say it was bad. Like, if a snake fucked a tarantula and their baby died in a tar pit and was later reanimated by a necromancer who graduated at the absolute bottom of his class.

“Thanks,” I said in a voice that was a mere two octaves higher than usual.

I received nothing in response but a contemptuous curl of Eva’s upper lip. But both of us moved more carefully after that, and startled at small noises. By the time dusk settled over the woods—although I’m not convinced it’s ever fully not-dusk here; it seems to exist on a limited palette ranging from gloaming to gloomy—we were shivery and tense, and I’d spent the last several miles trying and failing to think of a funny name for the twitch in my left eye.

Eva held up her hand and I flinched backward. “What, where—”

She was pointing silently through the trees. I followed the line of her finger and saw it: a high stone wall stained a viscous, tarry black. I looked upward through the dark lace of the leaves, and that was the moment it occurred to me that Eva and I could have prepared better for what struck me now as a laughable attempt at a rescue mission. We could, for example, have brought siege weaponry, or a smallish army, or one of those big mech suits from Pacific Rim. Instead, we brought two kitchen knives and an assortment of underpowered magical objects, like video game characters rushing to the boss battle without leveling up.

I say, “Oh, yikes,” which really undersells the enormity of the yikes we’re facing.

I mean, sure, when one is looking for the lair of a cannibal queen, one expects to encounter a certain degree of spookiness. One might anticipate something resembling the Beast’s castle pre-makeover, with gargoyles and buttresses and more lightning storms than is statistically likely. One does not anticipate what I’m seeing now, which is a jagged ruin of black glass and bones that makes the Black Gate of Mordor look like the Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse. Trees press against the walls, reaching over the battlements with fawning fingers. Dark, winged things circle the towers, screeching in too-human voices.

“Well.” Eva makes a sardonic gesture at the walls. “What are we waiting for?”

After another brief round of hissing (“This was your idea.” “I know! There’s just like, more skulls than I was expecting! Give me a second.”), I gather myself and say calmly, “Okay, there has to be a back way in.”

“I very much doubt it. If I built an impregnable fortress to hold my desperate victims, I certainly wouldn’t—”

“Yeah, I know, but there’s always a back way in. Trust me.” Eva’s face makes a funny flinch, which I can only assume is her natural response to the concept of trust, but she trails huffily behind me as we circle the wall. A few guards go clomping past us along the battlements, but none of them seem to see us creeping below them. I guess this isn’t the kind of place that people often try to get into.

After less than fifty feet of sneaking, a damp, foul breeze emerges from somewhere nearby and wafts across us. It smells like old meat and human suffering, and it leads us without much trouble to a rusted, weed-choked grate set in the earth.

I wave my hand and whisper, “Voilà. A back way in.”

Eva squints sourly at the sewer grate. She sniffs. “It must be nice. Being the protagonist.”

I give her my cheekiest smile and say, “It suits you.” It comes out more sincerely than I intended, and Eva’s eyes flick to mine, then away.

I haul the grate aside and shimmy down the hole, landing with a fairly repellent plop. The water (it is not water) is sludgy and cold, running halfway up my thighs. It feels like an obvious moment for Eva to cut and run, but she lands beside me without fuss and strides onward, looking—just for a moment, in the dark—a little like a hero.



* * *



WE WADE THROUGH the muck for just long enough that I’m starting to worry that these sewers function as actual sewers rather than plot devices and don’t lead anywhere useful, but then we hear things echoing off the wet stone walls: cries and pleas, the miserable clink-clink of chains dragging across stone floors. The unmistakable sounds of a castle dungeon.

There’s a grate directly above us, casting a sickly shard of light across Eva’s face. I nod upward. “This is our stop.”

We slither out into a space that looks like a slightly larger version of the sewer we just left, except that there are greasy torches spitting along the walls and cells with iron bars for doors. Most of them are empty, and some of them contain … pieces … that I refuse to look at long enough to identify. We pass a cell with actual, live occupants, but my heart sinks when I see that they aren’t children.

But one of them is a tall woman with a proud arch to her nose and warm brown skin. The others are slumped listlessly against the walls, but this woman is on her feet, reaching through the bars to wiggle a shard of bone in the lock. Her hair is twisted neatly away from her face.